Taking a u-turn down a familiar dusty gravel road.

August 27, 2011

Injured List

When I arrived at Carl's with the shrimp, his boy Carter was hobbling around on crutches. Two days before he was running around on the football field barefoot, jammed his toe, and came up with "turf toe", a badly broken big toe. This is the week before football begins and he's one of the starters on the 8th grade squad. He's out now for eight weeks. Carl had been on him for some time about wearing proper footwear. Carter's buddy, Nicky was over for a visit. He broke his ankle playing football and was on crutches too.

Carl and I took the shrimp over to Mark and Jana's. Their buddy Sammy was on crutches, having just had hip surgery. He was learning how to get in and out of their pool with the least amount of stress to the body.

Later in the evening, we had the pool area looking good for the party. Mark and Sammy were repairing some of the floating furniture for the pool tomrorrow. When he got out of the pool, Mark complained that his back was hurting. Carl offered to pop his back. Carl weighs about 220 lbs and Mark weighs probably 260 lbs. Carl pulled him onto his back and then his feet slipped out of his flip flops and Carl fell face first onto the decking with Mark on his back. Blood was everywhere. I quickly grabbed some beach towels. Mark ran to the house and got a baggy full of ice. Carl's nose was broken. Again. For the 4th time. We grabbed our stuff and headed back to Carl's house. Carl kept the ice on it for a long time. As he lied there with a bag of ice on his face, I reminded Carl what the cause of tonight calamity was: Improper footwear.

The next night, Carl's youngest son had a football game. Carl dropped me off at the birthday party and he went to the football game. The party was great. The shrimp was awesome. There was supposedly some corned beef that I never saw, or ate. Later that night, Carl picked me up and we headed home. While we were gone, Carl's wife, Donna, heard a loud crash and then someone yelling "Owwww" at the end. Carter was at the top of the stairs and still was not used to the crutches. He tried to come down the steps using the crutches and put his foot first. He teetered on the crutches and then sommersaulted down the steps and hit the wall on his way down 14 steps to the bottom. He had a cut on his nose, just like his Dad.

Comments

Which is why when I broke my ankle, I learned that when it came to steps sitting was the only way to go down. And whenever I was in a situation where I was losing my balance, ditch the crutches and grab onto something, or shift my center of gravity backwards so my (bad)leg would simply slide out from under me without reinjury, and my butt would absorb the impact. Did manage to bruise my tailbone that way, though.